Source Magazine, Issue 92, Winter 2017. Review by Eugenie Shinkle

Petr Antonov’s Trees, Cars, Figures of People, Assorted Barriers is the result of four years spent photographing the cities and suburbs of Russia. Antonov works in a genre that we might call 'new global landscape’—post Dusseldorf-school style documentary photography that engages with the unspectacular urban environment and its peri-urban fringes. There’s nothing outstandingly original about Antonov’s photographic style—the minute detail and slightly undersaturated colour palette, the oblique angles and elevated viewpoints, the focus on infrastructure and the pervasive banality of planning-committee public space. But all of this is quite deliberate, as is the decision to leave out any information about the exact location of the photographs. Instead, each image is captioned with a list of its contents—lamp posts, power lines, residential buildings, waste bins, figures of people at work and at leisure. These lists of features could apply to any city in the world—the specificity of place only emerges between the lines, in the nuances of detail (the language on signs, the minutia of climate and clothing and architecture) that Antonov’s terse descriptions leave out. It’s a drearily limited and increasingly ubiquitous list of features, and that’s precisely the point. Antonov’s book is a clever, subtle comment on the growing standardisation of public space and public activities, and on the way that this homogeneity is creeping into private life as well. 

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The timeline between freshness and ubiquity has collapsed to nearly nothing; books that look sexy when they first come out often feel hopelessly dated after a few months. The standout pieces in this selection—by Antonov, Chick, and Moore—suggest that the way to outplay convention is not necessarily to rail against it but to work slowly and carefully within it, understanding the cliché itself as a form to be adapted through a series of subtle twists and turns. The enemy of photography will be defeated not by demolishing its foundations but by quietly remaking its interior.